The Art of Persistence
by andthearrowflies
Summary: Nine times Artemis almost kisses Wally, and one time she does.


hello, all! I'm sorry for being so m.i.a., but the past few months have been really busy/stressful for me (I had some not so nice experiences with some not so nice people, not to mention finals). I've recently discovered all of the beautiful prompt tables on livejournal, and so I've been using some of the prompts I've found on there to inspire some new work. These prompts are taken from/inspired by the prompts from 10-cliche fics. I'm actually not really sure how i feel about this work (yes, no?), so I'd appreciate some feedback from you all, thanks!

~ Catherine

* * *

**i. clinically**

He is a scientist, after all, so she supposes it makes sense; the sterility of his hands, the white-washed conversations and remarks, the bleached eyes and efficient way he avoids her and the brief gazes that will be recorded on a clipboard with no room for interpretation or wondering.

And in a way, she's a scientist as well, because even when her first attempt to make him talk to her, like a normal, breathing human being, is launched and immediately snuffed out, she keeps trying. Multiple trials are conducted, all with the same result. He is never upset, never angry, never. His composure is the most unnerving thing about him, and she longs to slap him and climb over to him and kiss him wherever her lips happen to land, anything it would take to illicit a reaction.

She does not. And neither does he.

The day is young, and barely breathing, and only Wally is fully living in the mission briefing room. He eats some Nilla Wafers and crows about how he's seen at least _a dozen hundred_ alien invasion movies, despite the fact that a) that isn't a real number and b) she's pretty sure there aren't that many alien invasion movies in existence, and so he's highly qualified to protect all of them. When she looks skeptical, he assures her that if she pees herself, he won't tell anyone. She slaps the back of his head.

Behind the joking is an ardent vow, and it bleeds a bit onto the ground when they arrive back from the edge. All she got was one wild, misplaced look, and then he disinfected his scientist eyes.

**ii. superhuman**

"Wally," she says, "you're not invincible."

His Kelvar suit smells dank and, around his hands, has turned completely black because of the mud, the mud caked around his fingers, the very same mud that is squelching in your boots and hardening your hair. Seriously, he smells terrible, like he decided to go swimming in sulfur and cow shit. Of course, her own odor is probably just as bad - Batman had emphasized the severity of this mission during the briefing but had said little to nothing on the miles and miles of sludge that had been awaiting them. It's probably in her underwear. Scratch that, it's _definitely_ in her underwear

Despite the obvious repulsiveness of his appearance, Wally appears quite cheerful, almost _chipper_. He is smirking at her, his hands crossed behind his bandaged head (Sportsmaster snarls, Wally cries out, he falls, and her vision turns the same shade of dark red flowing from his skull).

"I'm pretty damn close," he reasons. "I'm more invincible than you, anyway."

She gives him a sullen look. "That doesn't mean you have to take a _sledgehammer _for me," she says, her fingers drumming against her forearms as she shifts her weight uncomfortably.

"It was totally hot, wasn't it?" He tries to wink at her but ends up just getting mud in his eye. She snorts.

"You truly are the picture of stupidity."

"_What_ever_. _Are you going to sign my head now?"

His casual manner is infuriating. "I am not -" She shakes a fist, wordlessly enraged, at his knowing grin (and oh, does he know). "Wally," she says slowly, like she's speaking to a three year old. A slowly, mentally incapacitated three year old. "You almost died."

He shrug, and she bites down so hard her teeth rub against each other and squeak. "Have we forgotten who I am?" He gestures to his black and red body.

"Completely disgusting?" she mutters.

"I was going to say Super Fast Metabolism Boy, but I'll give you that one," he says. He wrinkles his nose as he sniffs his shoulder. "I can heal myself. You can't," and it is with a swiftness that only Kid Flash possesses that his expression becomes grave, and her arms fall, incapable of anything productive, to her side. He stares at the end of his hospital bed for a moment, and then gives a little jump. When he turns back to her, he is jovial again. "Okay, it probably wasn't my best idea. Whatever. The point is, I saved your life and now you should probably kiss me or something."

"Or something," she says dryly, but her voice gets too dry halfway through and it cracks. For a brief moment, she sees herself giving in and kissing him, wiping the snark off his face in the process. He's covered in mud, but so is she, and underneath the dirt she thinks he probably tastes like warm cinnamon, and his lips would function adequately enough that she would forget the way they fluttered uselessly as he lay in the mud that couldn't absorb his blood fast enough.

Instead, she smacks his arm. He yelps and glares at her, a look of betrayal on his face. "Hey, not invincible here, remember?"

Her response is to bite the inside of her lip as she shakes her head disbelievingly at the ceiling. When she stalks out just moments later, it is on the pretense that she is utterly annoyed with him, instead of just scared of how easily she could've wiped the mud from his lips and leaned in.

**iii. chance encounter**

There is one particularly awful day when she thinks she sees him across the street from her school.

She is leaving the building, hurrying as usual to escape the stench of the privileged and the wealthy, and for a second her eyes land on red hair across the street. It's not possible, because her identity (for the moment, anyway) is still a secret, and her past is still her own burden to bear, but even as she points this out to herself, her combat boots stop marching of their own accord and she stands on the steps, squinting.

It's difficult to see above the bobbing heads of the senator's daughters and CEO's sons surrounding her, but he certainly _looks_ like Wally, the correct posture and stance, the right milkshake gripped in his left hand. Artemis, almost half-crazed with the coincidence of it all, imagines that he's there for _her_, to talk, to apologize for the way the sai clattered on the floor and tracker found itself on the trophy shelf.

And then a smaller kid breaks out from the crowd and scampers across the street, and the two of them hi-five and walk away. She waits for another moment, and then, after being elbowed squarely in the back, begins her trek back to the shadows and fire escapes that is her home.

**iv. prove it**

The drums in your ear are beating, and oh, how they beat. Your fingers clench onto nothing. This ship has controls but they have no substance, not really, and you long for something to twist between your fingers until it breaks. Your mother's words, spoken in ignorance of how they could make everything horribly wrong, coupled with Roy, make you tense, anxious, a gripping feeling in your gut. Suddenly, this has become second grade, and you and Jade are both clawing at each other for the same thing, except Jade is better and faster and stronger and you know she's going to win in the end, she always -

"Ah… this could wind up being one of those things that sounds better in my head than out loud?" You look up. Wally is rubbing the back of his neck, smiling somewhat sheepishly, and you are immediately on guard (lately, you have to remind yourself to be - sometimes it's hard to remember to snap at him when you're tired and he is making you hot chocolate while hitting on you in frightfully poor French).

"But you are a real archer."

When you look skeptical, he rushes on, tripping over his words, throwing his hands out as if to stop you from leaving. "No, I mean – I'm jazzed about Red Arrow! Uh, we go way back, y'know? But you… you've made your own place on the team. You have nothing to prove. Not to me, okay?"

The drumming isn't gone but it's softer, and she can think clearly (or not clearly at all, she isn't quite sure), and behind everything, she hears a piano, of all things. "Okay," you say, and you exhale as you speak. At what point exactly did you stop breathing? "And, Wally?" He turns back around expectantly, his face lit by the half-light of the control board and the cockpit safety light, and you falter. "It... sounded fine out loud."

**v. pernicious**

For the fourth time that month, he comes into her room carrying not one but three smoothies and his chemistry textbook.

"Finals," he says conversationally as she sips through the straw as daintily as she can, making eyes at him that are intended to mock. "They're, uh… yeah, finals."

He came into this room with only one smoothie the first time, chugging it down relentlessly, and berated her for not understanding the difference between alpha and beta reactions while she sat at her desk with her open textbook in her lap and growled threats at him.

Now, they lie on the floor. She has one strawberry mango smoothie and he has two. His voice is low and carpeted and she digs her fingernails into her fist when he leans over the shoddy, half-assed answers she gave on past tests, blowing air out of his cheeks. He'll be the death of her, she's certain.

**vi. not now**

"We just have to face it," says Zatanna sadly. "He's on crack."

Artemis glares at her, brushing her hair out of her face as she squints out of the window on the sidewalk below. The chalk drawing isn't done yet, but he's been out there for long enough now that she can tell what is. Or what is intended to be, anyway – the _L_ looks a bit like a hockey stick and he apparently doesn't know how to spell _You_ because there is a half-scrubbed out attempt (seriously, who spells _You_ wrong?).

Next to the words – the inauspicious, appalling words that are accompanied by the horrible sound of chalk (she hates chalk) – there is what is starting to look menacingly like a portrait of her. It's a girl, anyway, with blonde hair, and her eyes are as dark as the street and as hard and unyielding, and they stare down Artemis as if she has something to account for. As he works, Wally looks up and salutes her.

"Really high end crack," adds Zatanna. Opening the window, she leans her head out of it, despite Artemis yanking on her shoulders to get her back into the sanctuary of her bedroom. "Hey Wally! Where'd you get the crack?"

"What?" he shouts at them. "What did you say?"

"Jesus Christ –"

Artemis tugs Zatanna away from the window, pushing her back more forcefully than necessary; Zatanna stumbles and trips over the literature textbook lying open on the floor to _A Perfect Day for Banana Fish_. She huffs sullenly, but Artemis ignores her, going to close the window. Because she doesn't _need _this, not here, not now, because her mother is going to come back from tea with the neighbors and see the chalk art (barely art, it was a scribble at best), and she is going to expend all her energy on keeping a straight face, because Wally's hands are most certainly coated with chalk at the moment and he wipes them across his jeans as he waits for her to come downstairs, and because she kind of wants to –

"Yo, Artemis!" He is standing by her nose (the chalk nose, it looks like a bird), breathing heavily in the ashes and the sunlight moving around him. "You like it?"

The fact that he just quoted _Rocky_ must be ignored right now (that asshole, he knows she loves that movie). "What the hell are you doing?" she calls. "Like, what even in the actual _hell_ are you doing?"

"Come on, you know you love it," he calls, and even from four stories up she can out the waggle of his eyebrows, the lilt in his smile, the casual confidence that he is right and she is wrong.

She rolls her eyes and blows a kiss down at him. The derision in the gesture, however, loses itself in translation and he reaches up and catches it as seriously as if it were real.

**vii. owe**

She grabs him at the last second. She's so close to not grabbing him at all, because M'gann and Dick are speaking urgently, panicked in her mind, and because the grunt fighting her is actually adequately skilled (she ducked as he aimed a meaty fist at her, but not fast enough), and her head is throbbing from being clipped in the right temple, and it is then, turning away to spit blood onto the ground, that her eyes land on the man loading the machine gun.

"Get down!" shouts Artemis. Wally blinks at her. He's bleeding from the shoulder. She barely has time to roll her eyes before she clutches at his arm and yanks him to the ground behind a boulder, just as a bazooka is unleashed at them. The sound, the literal roar of bullets, tears at her head and she hisses in pain as it breaks her capacity for noise.

All she is aware of his how loud everything is, and so when he speaks, his words have melted into the burnt, goopy soundscape. She blinks at him, irrationally irritated, until he gets the message.

He comes closer, and even though someone is shooting at them, it is exquisitely normal for him to lean in and speak into her ear. "Thanks," he says. "I guess I owe you one now?"

"You owe me several," she clarifies.

Lips graze her ear, totally by accident, but her insides turn to iron anyway, and later, the machine gun is only background noise behind Wally's sincere yet sarcastic thank you breathed into her ear.

**viii. no way out**

"Are you kidding me?" demands Artemis before the old Coca-cola bottle has truly stopped spinning. It is already clear that it is going to land on the same person whom it landed on the past two spins, which she had loudly (and a bit desperately) declared were null and void. He shoots her a scathing glare that doesn't quite manage to hide the red color in his cheeks that is awkward shade apart from his hair.

Across the circle, Robin's eyes go unnaturally wide. "Wow," he says, exchanging a glance with Zatanna, who snorts into her fist. "Artemis spun the bottle onto Wally not once but _three_ times? Who would've guessed that? It's almost like it's _meant to be_."

Artemis narrows her eyes at the two black-haired preteens; Robin sitting with his legs crossed and his hands in their laps, blinking demurely at her, Zatanna making inhuman noises into her clenched hand and rocking back and forth. "You charmed the bottle," she accuses, jabbing a finger at them, the traitors.

Zatanna, evidently unable to hold it back anymore, throws her head and cackles so wildly that it's almost demonic. Robin winks at Wally, who flushes even deeper red.

M'gann is personally offended. "If you charm the bottle," she asks hotly, "how are we supposed to know if they're actually –" Glancing warily at Artemis, and then at Wally, she mouths _meant to be_ at Zatanna, who only howls harder.

"We're not meant to be," snaps Artemis at the same time Wally speaks the exact same words. She snarls and whips her head towards him, nostrils flared, and he shrinks back.

"Hey, you have no actual proof we did it!" protests Robin.

Connor snorts. "Except that you practically admitted to it." Zatanna, who has somewhat returned from her euphoric state, giggles again.

Kaldur decides to intervene now. "Zatanna and Robin," he begins slowly, and the two conspirators give each other a glance that clearly conveys some sort of inside joke. "I thought we discussed this. I thought we decided that –"

"-magic, while entertaining and useful in combat, should not be used to force other teammates to kiss," recites Robin dutifully.

"_And _it ruins the game," adds M'gann. Connor pats her consolingly on the back.

"Not for us it doesn't," says Zatanna, and she and Robin high-five like they've been doing all their lives.

Artemis clenches a fist. "Get a room, why don't you?" she hisses vehemently.

"Oh, that's the thing, we totally _would_, but the bottle didn't land on us," sings Zatanna. Every word she speaks oozes with exuberance, and the possibility of her suggesting they play spin the bottle for the very purpose of this exact stunt seems more and more likely by the second.

"We don't actually have to kiss, do we?" asks Wally, and she snorts, a bit hypocritically, she admits, at the sheer panic in his voice. "It was rigged. It's corrupt. It doesn't count."

M'gann makes a strangled sound in her throat. "You have to!" she pleads. Connor shrugs apologetically, clearly unable to help them. Zatanna and Robin, of course, whoop in agreement, and even Kaldur – who _should _have been on the side of order and _sanity_ – makes a strange face, as if he is trying to hold back a smile but is really not succeeding.

"These are the rules of the game," he admits. Wally's mouth flops open stupidly, but he doesn't manage to actually say anything.

Before Artemis can make her case for as to why she will _never_ – and she means _never_ – kiss that hopeless, aggravating, repulsive toad that barely qualifies as a real human being, the PA system crackles and Batman's voice is suddenly in the room, trivializing their game and straightening their spines before he's even finished saying a word. The bottle is forgotten in the sudden anxious anticipation, and next week, Connor finds it on the ground and, forgetting what it had been used for, tosses it in the trash.

**ix. insanity**

She sees in her dad's eyes how stupid she must look, how naïve, and she knows that he can't understand her honest belief that her team would ever forgive her for growing up in the shadows of his greatest achievements and of taller apartment buildings that crumbled when it rained.

And for a split second, she forgets, and she lets that familiar terror of _oh, God, what will they say _constrict her throat. But then her dad's head snaps up, and she turns to have just missed Wally, all limbs and burning red and yellow, who knocks over her dad with a hot ferocity she's never seen before.

He nods at her, ever so briefly, and everything is okay again.

**x. sudden and inevitable**

It was always there, really.

Like two planets around the same star that simply cannot stop burning, scorching the lack of air around it to a burnt crisp of nothing, their paths were destined to meet. Sometimes he rocketed ahead of her, and sometimes she found herself lurching in front of him, always pausing to stick her tongue out, but eventually, the equilibrium would settle in and their journeys would align themselves with another.

In the past few hours, the only sounds that have graced her earlobes are crunching metal, shouts and heaving groans, commands that were roared at her, the only things that kept her alive. And a few words gasped into her ear as they floated in the air that was being sucked away from them.

When _Auld Lane Syne_ echoes through the Watchtower, therefore, just as the clock strikes midnight, the gentle, quiet melody is so alien when juxtaposed to the chaos of the past twenty-four hours that is startling, and she almost flinches with the strangeness of it. Things such as new years and lullabies and January's, things that seemed impossible an hour ago, are suddenly feasible and overall very likely.

Wally, standing next to her as he has been all night, breathes in sharply. Before she can glance over at him or offer some comfort poorly disguised as a jibe, she is picked up, scooped up in his arms as if it's nothing. She waves her arms in the air, scoffing without words – the jibe she was preparing really feels appropriate now – but forgets when she sees how serious he is, and how his eyes, bright and alive, contrast with the dull bruise on his cheek.

"I should've done this a long time ago," he murmurs, somewhat sheepishly.

No, I should've, she thinks, but it is understood and she doesn't feel inclined to say it. Instead she smirks at him, and says, "No kidding." She wraps her arms around his neck and leans in.

In the hazy daydream that was remembering, the kiss that follows makes sense; everything she said to him, every word he spit at her, every time she scoffed at his honest attempts to be nice to her, was leading up to this moment.

It just took a little time for it to take no time at all.


End file.
